Un-Bucket List #3: Go Winter Camping

We are in the throes of winter, and even though this winter (at least for us) has been a mild one, I’m still grateful to curl up in a warm bed. It would never, ever enter my mind that I might be fun to go out and camp . . . in the snow. There are people who feel differently, however. There are some people who think that camping out in below freezing temperatures could be a grand, exciting experience. I’ve never been one of those people. Winter camping has never, ever been on my bucket list, and yet, I have been winter camping. Why? Because I married a man who can talk me into almost anything and one year he talked me into going camping in the dead of winter.

“It’s not as cold as you think it will be,” he said.

“We can build a quinzhee,” he said.

“Winter shelters are so efficient, they actually get toasty inside.”

“It will be fun.”

These were all the lies that I believed, the lies that got me into a pair of cross country skis venturing out for a night of winter camping.

Guess what happens when you ski for miles and miles to your camping destination? You get hot and sweaty. Then you stop. And then you get COLD.

The promised warm quinzhee winter shelter did not work out as planned. The tent that was erected instead was not “toasty.” It was freezing.

I don’t know if any of you remember years and years ago when Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner wrecked his snowmobile and spent a night stranded in Wyoming in the snow and lost one of his toes to frostbite?

That was the very same night that I spent winter camping.

I’ve never been so cold.

The purpose of this un-bucket list is to outline some of the very cool things I’ve done that I never planned to do. This is one of those things, but instead of being “cool” it was cold. Most of my un-bucket list experiences were wonderful, great experiences. I can’t say that of winter camping. It’s not one of my great memories. I promised to never go again, but admittedly, there is something alluring about vast expanses of snow under moonlight and the quiet of winter. There is something to be said of waking up to a muted world and the intimacy of listening to your own breathing. There is something appealing about traveling to a place on your own, under the power of your own muscles, of seeing your own breath and finally getting warm enough to nod off to sleep.

There is something to be said for having experienced it.

And oh, how I love being warm again.

Un-Bucket List #2: See a Van Gogh

I was a substitute teacher in an art class this week. The room was gloriously colorful and cluttered and student artwork was everywhere: stacked on the floor against the walls, along the whiteboard rim, on every horizontal table surface, and painted on the ceiling tiles. The walls, too, were covered but not with student artwork. The walls had paintings by the masters: Picasso, Monet, Michelangelo, Matisse, M.C. Escher, Georgia O’Keefe, Salvador Dali, and Vincent Van Gogh. I stopped in front of the Van Gogh’s. The paintings here on the walls were printed reproductions, flat in color and texture, like washed-out replicas of the real things.

I know because I stood in front of Van Gogh paintings at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. As an LDS missionary, my companion and I both bought museum passes that let us in whenever we wanted. Sometimes we went to the Van Gogh museum just for lunch. Sometimes we went to sit among the colors and people and the awe of being there. It gave us time to see all the paintings over and over again. I loved the thick bright brush strokes on Van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers” and the bright cobalt and purples of “Irises.” These were the paintings I remembered from art history. I also loved “The Potato Eaters.” This painting was dark and earthy, a shadowed glimpse into the life of country peasants.

Seeing a Van Gogh painting was never on my bucket list mostly because I thought it seemed like such an impossibility. There I was though, surrounded by Van Gogh’s day after day and it was amazing.

Most absent from my experience was a personal glimpse of “The Starry Night” which is not housed in Amsterdam but in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I can see it in my mind: thick swirling brush-strokes with blues, blacks, and pops of white and yellow. I imagine the church steeple, the crescent moon, and the movement of the sky and hillside. I’d love to see it. Someday.

Un-bucket List: #1: Milk a Cow

I’m starting my un-bucket list with what is, for me, the most obvious of all items on my list. It is true that I’ve seen “milk a cow” on people’s bucket lists and as a dairyman’s daughter I’m a bit flabbergasted. I don’t know why someone would purposely want to milk a cow. For one, it usually takes waking up at say, 4 am, when all reasonably minded people are still in bed. And yes, cows are generally docile creatures, but they do kick and the milking regions are in close proximity to the hooves. Mostly, though, I guess I just don’t understand what it is to NOT milk a cow. For our family, milking cows was a lifestyle; one drastically different from those who didn’t “milk.” Milking meant not opening Christmas presents until after “milking.” Milking meant planning your piano recital, your outings with friends, and even your wedding between “milkings.” Milking cows ruled our lives, our schedules, and interrupted everything.

It was also our livelihood. I knew it, and I never took it for granted. As a girl would stand on the spout of the milk tank, open the lid, and look into the white milk churning in the tank. I loved the sight of that full milk tank. It made me feel safe and whole and prosperous.

Admittedly, I didn’t milk cows often. This chore fell mostly to the men in my family. My grandfather and father had a relationship with their cows that was agitated when strangers were around; it was best to leave the ebb and flow of cows and suction machines and hydraulic gates to them. The cows responded to the clicks of their tongues, their low commands of “come boss,” and slaps on their flanks.

I have milked cows, though, both by hand and by machine. Both require a gently cleansing of the udders. This we did with soft washcloths dipped in warm water. So much of milking a cow requires being near the animal’s rear. Sometimes a strong hand on the rump can calm a fidgety cow. There’s not much to milking by machine, once you have the machine in place under the udders you simply slip them on. They suction on and do the work of milking for you. Milking by hand is trickier. Like a lot of things, it isn’t as easy as it looks. It can help to sort of massage the cow’s udder first. You should start at the top of the teat and squeeze downward. It requires a certain rocking motion of the hand. Your hand will get tired and cramp up. The cow might poop near your head. You will not look like a cute milkmaid with blond braids. Trust me on this. Chances are, it is not as glamorous or easy or fulfilling as you thought it would be. Still, there is something about the sound of a squirt of milk in an empty tin bucket, the warmth of the milk, the bulk of the animal that makes is seem like both a simple and a monumental task at the same time. I warn you: It takes a lot of milk to fill a bucket. After all that work, the bucket will only be half-full—or half-empty, depending on how you look at it.

I wish I could turn “milk a cow” into a metaphor for life; after all, growing up on a farm taught me a lot about a lot of things. I don’t love to milk cows, but milking cows let me do other things that I loved: like having a calf suck on your fingers or watching a baby calf being born. Those things were some of my favorite things and neither was on my bucket-list either. They were just part of the life I lived.

Intro: The Un-Bucket List

It is almost a new year, and I've been thinking. There has been a lot of loss since we left Wyoming. There have been people we knew who've died young and tragically. It has weighed heavy on my mind and heart.

I think I'm one of those people who sees the glass as half empty. I hate to admit that, but I think I am. Life has been different than I imagined it and sometimes I've resented that. Sometimes I've let the letdowns stand in my way.

Lately, I've seen lots of bucket lists. You know, the things people want to do before they die. Things like: visit the Eiffel Tower, see a broadway play, or scuba dive.

I have my own list of things: watch the Northern Lights, see a firefly, write a book, visit Havasupai Falls. My list changes with time, but those are some things that have always been on it.

I haven't done any of those things.

But I have done some amazing things. I've done some things that I've seen on other people's bucket lists, but were never on my own. I'm going to tell you about them in the coming New Year of 2012. I'm calling it the "Unbucket List." I'm hoping it will help me appreciate the path my life has taken, even if the path was never on my roadmap.

Days of Infamy

Several weeks ago I attended a talk my famed children's writer Lois Lowry. She's a prolific writer with many, many wonderful books, the most famous of which is The Giver.

In her talk she spoke about her childhood and showed us a grainy photo of herself on a beach in Hawaii as a very little girl. The sky looked hazy and we focused on her, the famous lady as a child. Her father had been in the military and was stationed in Hawaii for a brief time. Just after the photo was taken their family moved away.

She moved on and spoke of other things, including the premise for the book The Giver, about a society that is sheltered from all the ill and evil and discomforts of the world as we know it. In their society there is no war and illness and the memories of those things are held only by the receiver of memories, the job that is assigned to the young protagonist (Jonas) of the story. It is a beautiful book, one of my favorites. There is a new gift addition available here.

So Lois Lowry told us of her life, some experiences she'd had, and of her books and her writing. Then, at the very end, she returned to the photo of her as a very little girl on the beach in Hawaii. She pointed it out, in the haze, on the horizon just behind her: an outline of the U.S.S. Arizona. The photo had been taken just a couple of months before the day that will live in infamy: December 7, 1941. The juxtaposition of the happy family at the beach and the ship that would soon lie sunk at the bottom of Pearl Harbor with tremendous loss of life was both poignant and startling. Lois Lowry didn't live in Hawaii anymore on December 7th. Her family had moved and were living on the mainland. Lois Lowry pointed out that in a book such as The Giver, society would have no memory of something as violent and horrific as the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that rattled the world. And yet, the terrible moments shape us just as the wonderful moments do.

We are not one without the other.

We cannot be.

Tomorrow Morning

Tomorrow morning Idaho will execute it's first death row inmate in 17 years.

I have a public blog. For that reason, there are things I don't share here. I have something to share about tomorrow's events in Idaho. Something personal. If you want to hear it, leave me a comment and I'll send you my entry about it. You must be someone I know personally. That's it. That's the deal on this one. Just cause it has to be that way.

It's Autumn Time

I miss my mother most in the fall.

She loved autumn: the colors, the crispness in the air, and the sense of change. By autumn, freckles from summer peppered her face. They always made her look young and vibrant. She was married in October, before the snow fell. Her bridesmaids wore avocado green and shades of orange.

I, too, love fall, but my heart also aches for her this time of year. This was the winding down time; the time of year when our hope of a prolonged life for her was gone and we settled our minds instead on just being together. All the things that needed doing were set aside. There were good days then, before the vomiting and morphine and vials of medications.

We knew winter was coming with its emptiness, harshness, and stark absence. We knew she wouldn’t be there with us, to weather its storms or to smile when the hummingbirds came back the next spring.

Every year, it seems like I count down the days again. I mourn the loss of the leaves, the browning of the hillsides, and the death of my mother. She loved autumn enough to stay for it’s full duration. The first snow fell just hours after she died.

It seems fitting now, that my favorite time of year is filled with a sort of longing: for warm days and cool nights, for long slow walks, for the smell of maple and cinnamon, and to be loved the way only my mother loved me. I long for an elusive kind of peace. The kind that comes with feeling good about change; with hanging on to some things and letting go of others. It’s the time of year when I’m struck by how much I don’t have the answers. How much I miss being sheltered like a child.

All of my worries churn like the leaves rustling on the ground.

Then my children come, run through them, pick them up and toss them heavenward.

And I remember: I used to do that too.